The Future Has a Kill Switch

palegray.net writes "Bruce Schneier brings us his perspective on a future filled with kill switches; from OnStar-equipped automobiles and city buses that can be remotely disabled by police to Microsoft's patent-pending ideas regarding so-called Digital Manners Policies. In Schneier's view, these capabilities aren't exactly high points of our potential future. From the article: 'Once we go down this path — giving one device authority over other devices — the security problems start piling up. Who has the authority to limit functionality of my devices, and how do they get that authority? What prevents them from abusing that power? Do I get the ability to override their limitations? In what circumstances, and how? Can they override my override?' We recently discussed the Pentagon's interest in kill switches for airplanes. At what point does centralizing and/or delegating operational authority over so much of our lives become a dangerous practice of its own?"

Comments

Bad query, bad idea

[GameboyRMH]

First of all, it would be

DELETE * FROM comments WHERE poster_name="Anonymous Coward";

Even then there's a logical flaw. Anons don't have usernames, so if you ran that query, no anon posts would be deleted, and if there happened to be anyone with the username Anonymous Coward (And IIRC there is) they'd be very upset with you. Maybe something more along the lines of:

DELETE * FROM comments WHERE anonymous=1;

Even then there's an slight chance that there could be one or more worthwhile posts done in AC mode, so wiping them wouldn't be a good thing to do. Plus Slashdot comments are never deleted, and therefore the page was probably never designed to handle a comment being deleted (post nesting system etc.), so deleting a comment would probably throw the discussion page for a loop.